What’s it like to die? There’s no answer to this cheerful question, or there shouldn’t be. People have told us what it’s like nearly to die, to come back from the brink. The external process of death has been gone over in great detail. But no one has definitively returned from the other side, to tell us what it’s like to feel the last breath leaving your body. We don’t know anything about it.
Or rather, we shouldn’t know anything about it. In 1886, Tolstoy published a short story called “The Death of Ivan Ilych”, which follows a fairly unremarkable man to the complete extinction of life.
